SiteVisibility’s Predictions for search in 2015

We know everyone and their dog has pulled together predictions for 2015, I think I saw my first one back in August!

But we had a chat internally about what we reckon 2015 had in-store for the search industry and we wanted to share them with you.

2014 has been a big year for search, and it seems everyone at the SiteVisibility office has their own predictions on what will happen in the year ahead. We don’t have a crystal ball, but we can make some educated forecasts. What are you expecting for search in 2015?

Content Marketing

Scaling up of link earning and outreach tactics will become not only undesirable, but entirely ineffective. Content marketing will be reaching maturity, and that means that while there’ll be plenty of great content being created and spread, there will be plenty of bad content about, too.

To be successful, and to stand out from the content crowd, strategies will need a focus on the natural and human elements of content creation and outreach, rather than ‘quick wins’ and quantity, as users and customers become more and more savvy. 2015 might finally be the year where consensus considers one great, unique, shareable, useful piece of content as worthwhile as multiple ‘clickbait’ pieces. We can hope, at least!

Paid Search

We had a fair few predictions about paid search – as the internet develops, it’s a sector of online marketing that’s due to see some drastic changes. Here are some of the major ones:

Even more emphasis on Mobile & Localisation

We think Google will make it more accessible for smaller businesses to grow their presence through localised key terms and mobile devices. This will ultimately lead to mobile being an even bigger conversion and click generator for businesses online. For some of our clients, mobile clicks are driving conversions for desktop campaigns. More people tend to browse on a mobile device in order to undertake research on products / services before making a purchase on desktop. More businesses understand the importance of mobile, and are making their websites more accessible for users in order to help improve conversions. It is worth keeping an eye out for new mobile features that Google and other search engines are testing in beta in 2015!

More personalisation

Google lets you remarket your ads to users that have already visited your website through RLSA. We predict more businesses starting to use a personal approach to target their ads, based around core areas of the website that each user has visited. Businesses in 2015 will start to pick up these practices more in order to improve online conversions.

Google Call Tracking

We predict that Google will advance on their current call tracking solution. This has already been a huge success with clients that have implemented it onto their website, and it has allowed us to measure conversions more effectively. There are other call tracking solutions out there that take into account all referring types of traffic, so is this the next step for Google? It looks like we’ll have to wait and see!